When elections stop offering choices, they still deliver winners. What they no longer deliver is predictable governance. President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s decisive re-election looks like a democratic endorsement. Except it’s not. It’s a symptom of the fraying mechanics of the contests across Eastern and Southern Africa.
Tanzania’s example is telling because it was long an exception; a relatively stable frontier market with a reputation for incremental liberalisation. That reputation now masks a thinning of civic space. In the lead-up to the vote, opposition leaders were jailed, parties were weakened and several prominent candidates were effectively removed from the field.
Local and national contests produced routs for the ruling CCM rather than competitive tests of policy or leadership. The result is a mandate that, on paper, is decisive, but in practice narrows the pool of ideas, scrutiny and accountability that underpin sound governance.
The narrowing matters because Tanzania’s image as one of the next bright spots in East Africa has been project-driven, with new mining infrastructure deals and gas and energy projects. Those wins are tangible enough to prompt major SA banks, from Standard Bank to Nedbank, to put it high on their strategic expansion agenda.
Standard Bank CEO Sim Tshabalala, who presides over an empire with R3.4-trillion in assets is, by the dry standard of the profession, almost effusive about East Africa’s prospects.
“What excites me most is the tipping point we’re approaching. The continent has the minerals the world needs. We’re now building the infrastructure to extract and move them. But we must go further — develop refining capacity, regulatory frameworks and beneficiation strategies,” Tshabalala said. “East Africa is the shining light in all of this. If this doesn’t excite you, I’m not sure what will.”
Still, those wings are fragile. Ad hoc policy shifts, opaque contract processes and restrictions on foreign ownership have introduced legal and reputational risks that chill investors. When civic actors, journalists and opposition parties are sidelined, disputes are likelier to fester into arbitration, while projects slow and competent dissent — the kind that surfaces design flaws before they become headline crises — disappears.
Madagascar is a grimmer demonstration of the other pathway from fragility to rupture. There, chronic service delivery failures and elite capture met a youthful protest wave. A faction of security forces seized power after the executive sought to sidestep parliamentary oversight.
Uganda and Kenya offer contrasting but complementary warnings. In Kampala, the steady narrowing of space for dissent has been baked into political stability at the expense of renewal. Economic decisions have become personalised and the apparatus of the state is selectively deployed to entrench incumbency. In Nairobi, the familiar story of electoral contest has been punctuated by violent responses to protest and an erosion of trust in institutions.
Economic decisions have become personalised and the apparatus of the state is selectively deployed to entrench incumbency.
Ethiopia and Mozambique show how conflict and governance failures worsen fragility. Ethiopia’s regional conflicts and fractures in the security services have displaced millions and turned governance into a patchwork of emergency measures. Mozambique’s elections and governance deficits have been accompanied by corruption scandals and violent insurgency in the north, converting potential natural resource windfalls into security headaches and legal entanglements.
What ties these cases together is a pattern. Leaders trade off the friction of accountability for short-term gains of concentrated control. The immediate benefits of fewer street protests are tempting. Even so, the institutional sclerosis raises long-run costs such as capital that demands a political risk premium, and a domestic polity that grows more cynical and less tolerant of compromise.
This editorial is far from a plea for liberal indulgence. Countries with large infrastructure or extractive ambitions cannot finance or complete those ambitions on the basis of personalised decrees. Tanzania’s newly consolidated mandate presents a choice that is emblematic for the region. Leaders can use dominance to entrench control and accept the predictable economic drag that follows. Or they can treat authority as responsibility and shore up processes that make big projects deliverable. The latter is harder and less glamorous, but ultimately more productive.
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